Profitability Analytics

San Francisco’s Millennium Tower, the tallest residential building in the city, was constructed in 2009 and won numerous engineering awards upon construction. It didn’t take long, however, before it w

I enjoy maturity and evolution models of all kinds, especially for business. Stages of maturity models provide confidence that regardless what stage one is at – low or high – there is a next step furt

As revealed in IMA sponsored surveys over the past two decades, organizations continue to use invalid cost models to develop the cost information their managers use to support decision making despite

The popular New York City Broadway musical Hamilton has drawn attention to the founders of the USA who wrote the USA’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. Subsequently in 1789 the USA’s Constitutio

About fifteen years ago I had lunch with an individual who had recently left one of the “Big Three” domestic auto companies where she worked as a financial analyst for about five years. During our con

It is often reported that operational managers do not "trust" cost data from accounting, that they prepare and use their own cost data. What are the reasons for this distrust and what can be done to

To many people, management accounting is almost synonymous with cost accounting. Yet management accounting can, and should be, so much more. Management accountants aspiring to become business partners

The heartbeat of a business really is revenue generation, sales to customers. Optimizing processes and costs is necessarily a secondary event….I’m sorry to say this because I’ve always been a huge fan

Revenue management was pioneered as “yield management” by American Airlines in the 1980’s and subsequently deployed by Marriott International and others in diverse industries attempting to maximize t

How many times, as a management accountant, have you been asked for a “True” cost? Have you ever thought about what this means? What cost did you provide that was not “true”? And did you lie when

A gatekeeper is an individual who controls access to something. Ancient cities had gatekeepers whose job was to keep out undesirables. A college admissions officer is a gatekeeper who controls the mak

As management accountants, we traditionally focus on cost planning and cost management/control. Yet for most organizations, we should be doing more - we need to focus on organizational profitability,

This is a fictitious story about the wide gap and personality differences between the function of the chief marketing officer (CMO) and that of the chief financial officer (CFO). I made up the two cha

In an experiment described in the book “The Invisible Gorilla,” volunteers were shown a video of young people tossing a basketball around and were told to keep track of how many times a basketball was

What is the purpose of brakes — good brakes — on a car? To slow the car down? To stop the car? It's a thought-provoking question that you may have heard before. Perhaps the best and most expensive car

Can you imagine accountants as American cowboys of the Wild, Wild West in the 1800s? I can. And they can be dangerous. Yeehaw! Yippee-i-o-i-a! In place of guns in their belt holsters the cowboy accoun

I’ve seen a few things lately that aggravated something that I’ve found an irritant in costing discussions (both written and verbal) for nearly thirty years , so I thought my fellow PACE members woul